Basalt Recreation Department

Basalt Recreation Department Camp and Class Manager Case Study

Background

The Basalt Recreation Department serves Basalt, Aspen, and many other small communities within a 20-mile radius of the Colorado town. Director Dorothy Howard operates the department out of schools via an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA), running up to 25 programs for kids in any given season, including tennis, basketball, baseball, soccer, sailing, cross-country skiing, archery, and art.

Challenge

With no central office, participants were forced to register and pay at the Town Hall Finance department or mail in their registrations. Dorothy then had to drive across town to pick them up. Along with the mailed-in registrations, she then had to process each one manually on a credit card machine. The paperwork filled whole filing cabinets. Occasionally, some would get lost. At the end of the season, she had to empty out the file cabinet and store the registrations in notebooks. “The paper was outrageous,” she said. “And the time spent, well, it was just insane.”

Solution

In 2009, Dorothy first automated with Thriva, ACTIVE Network’s first camp management software, rather than ACTIVE’s Enterprise-level recreation management version. She needed something powerful and effective to streamline her overwhelming administrative process, but because she is the sole employee, she needed it to be lightweight. Thriva revolutionized registration and calmed the chaos. When Dorothy upgraded to ACTIVE’s new web-based Camp & Class Manager, she found many more innovations that make her job even easier:

Parents love the convenience of online registration and payment.

Accessibility from anywhere is game-changing.

Remote report access is available to the town’s Financial Director without placing added workload on Dorothy.

Targeted Communications containing direct registration links are easily sent from within the software to relevant participants and always yield an immediate upswing in registrations and fill rates.

Results

Only about 100 paper registrations in the last three years, continuing to decrease

Increased fill rate

100% increase in annual revenue since before ACTIVE

Efficiency in operating the recreation department has allowed Dorothy the time to build up program offerings. And Camp & Class Manager enables her to promote her programs through free, targeted marketing which, in turn, increases participation and revenue.

For anyone still using Thriva, she highly recommends making the switch to Camp & Class Manager. “I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t,” she says. “It’s so much better.”